«This essay overlaps to some extent with earlier essays of mine regarding the alleged existence of a "moderate Islam," including Do we want an Islamic Reformation? and Why We Cannot Rely on Moderate Muslims. In this discussion I take as my starting point the fact that the traditional Islamic religious texts -- the Koran supplemented by secondary sources such as the hadith literature -- through a straightforward reading encourage perpetual violence against non-Muslims around the world until the global supremacy of Islam and its followers has been firmly established. There are plenty of studies available confirming this. Muslim scholars themselves, including prominent ones such as al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun, have supported this view for well over one thousand years and continue to do so in the twenty-first century.

Muhammad Al-Arifi: "There is no doubt that a person whom Allah enables to sacrifice his soul, and to fight for the sake of Allah, has been graced with a great honor. The Prophet Muhammad said that the dust of battle for the sake of Allah and the smoke of Hell shall never meet in a man's nose. [...]

"Devotion to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. [...]

"Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight [the Muslims]. By Allah, the infidel countries today – the U.S. and its allies – dare to fight the Muslims, to rape their women and turn them into widows, and to inflict their corruption on Islam and the Muslims on a daily basis only because they see that the Muslims do not even consider fighting the infidels and conquering their countries. [...]

"The Koranic verses that deal with fighting the infidels and conquering their countries say that they should convert to Islam, pay the jizya poll tax, or be killed. If the Muslims had implemented this, we would not have reached the humiliation in which we find ourselves today."

Rightwing and religious Israelis were up in arms Tuesday after Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered IDF troops not to eat while patrolling IDF checkpoints in Judea and Samaria during the monthlong Muslim Ramadan month, which begins Thursday. In a statement, the Samaria Residents Council said that “it is sad to see that Barak has become an expert on Islam, as he sends IDF soldiers and border troops to tear down synagogues, beat up rabbis, issue orders to demolish Yeshivot, and arrest Jewish youths by dragging them by their peyot, their sidecurls. Is he Ehud Barak or 'Ahmed Barak,'?” the Council asked rhetorically.

On Monday, authorities in Hamburg, Germany announced that they had finally shut down the Taiba mosque, which as the Al-Quds mosque in 2001 was a meeting place for several of the 9/11 jihad terrorists, including Mohamed Atta, and which continued to be a hotbed of jihad activity thereafter: a May 2010 report from Hamburg's Interior Ministry called the mosque "the central attraction for the jihadist scene."

Christoph Ahlhaus, Hamburg's secretary of the interior, announced Monday: "Today we closed the Taiba mosque because young men were being turned into religious fanatics there. Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war. Hamburg cannot become a cradle for Islamists capable of violence."

Yet that is exactly what it was. In March 2009 eleven Islamic jihadists who met in the Taiba mosque went to Pakistan, apparently to attend a jihad training camp. The mosque's imam, Mamoun Darkazanli, may have aided al-Qaeda - and as the mosque was closed this week, his whereabouts were unknown.

The Palestinians, Alone

It has long been conventional wisdom that the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a prerequisite to peace and stability in the Middle East. Since Arabs and Muslims are so passionate about the Palestine problem, this argument runs, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate feeds regional anger and despair, gives a larger rationale to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and to the insurgency in Iraq and obstructs the formation of a regional coalition that will help block Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

What, then, are we to make of a recent survey for the Al Arabiya television network finding that a staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks? "This is an alarming indicator," lamented Saleh Qallab, a columnist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. "The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian cause itself."

But the truth is that Arab policies since the mid-1930s suggest otherwise. While the "Palestine question" has long been central to inter-Arab politics, Arab states have shown far less concern for the well-being of the Palestinians than for their own interests.

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan "was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon."

From 1948 to 1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to statehood. They also showed little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving their quality of life — which is part of the reason why 120,000 West Bank Palestinians moved to the East Bank of the Jordan River and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad. "We couldn't care less if all the refugees die," an Egyptian diplomat once remarked. "There are enough Arabs around."

Not surprisingly, the Arab states have never hesitated to sacrifice Palestinians on a grand scale whenever it suited their needs. In 1970, when his throne came under threat from the Palestine Liberation Organization, the affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan ordered the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, an event known as "Black September."

Six years later, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian Army, massacred some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar. These militias again slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in 1982 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this time under Israel's watchful eye. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians' rescue.

Worse, in the mid-'80s, when the P.L.O. — officially designated by the Arab League as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people" — tried to re-establish its military presence in Lebanon, it was unceremoniously expelled by President Hafez al-Assad of Syria.

This history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring the fate of the Palestinians goes on and on. Saddam Hussein, in an effort to ennoble his predatory designs, claimed that he wouldn't consider ending his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait without "the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Arab territories in Palestine."

Shortly after the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaitis then set about punishing the P.L.O. for its support of Hussein — cutting off financial sponsorship, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers and slaughtering thousands. Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge that "what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories."

Against this backdrop, it is a positive sign that so many Arabs have apparently grown so apathetic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For if the Arab regimes' self-serving interventionism has denied Palestinians the right to determine their own fate, then the best, indeed only, hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems.

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement.

Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London and author, most recently, of "Palestine Betrayed."

An illuminating post on the excellent Muqata blog (backed up also here) reveals what western pro-Palestinian war (aka peace) activists don’t tell us what happens -- it would seem frequently -- to the women amongst them when they sally forth to protect the ‘defenceless’ Arabs against Israeli ‘aggression’. They get sexually assaulted by the defenceless Arabs.

Back in July, Ha’aretz reported the story of a former Arab convict named Alladin who would find these young female peace activist staying in nearby villages, he would tell them he was on the run from the Shabak (Israel security), and ask them to hide him. These young female dupes would of course be happy to help an Arab on the lam from the Israeli authorities and let him sleep in their rooms.

So far one girl initially came forward about the attempted rape against her. She was found wandering the village of Umm Salmuna (near Bethlehem) in a state of shock, so who knows if the attempt actually failed. But in the end [she] retracted her story due to pressure to ‘not hurt the cause’. Haaretz had learned that representatives of both the popular protest movement and the PA have since applied pressure on the American peace activist as to prevent her from making the story public.

The story could have ended there, except that there’s more. Apparently, quite a number of female protesters have been sexually assaulted and molested by the Arabs they are protesting for. One attack occurred just recently in Bil'in. After the army fired smoke gas towards the rioting crowd of ‘peace’ activists and Arabs, the protesters ran. One Arab decisively used the smoke cover as an opportunity to sexually assault one of the more seasoned female activists.

The problem has gotten so bad, that some female protesters have stopped showing up to the protests...Two months ago, some of the radical leftwing organizers started running secret workshops... The subject? ‘How to deal with sexual harassment during direct activities against the occupation’. The workshop is for female and transgender activists.

As the days have passed, it has become ever clearer that the deadly ambush laid by the Lebanese army for the IDF, in which Israeli Lt Col Dov Harari was killed (his funeral is pictured here) along with three Lebanese soldiers and one Lebanese journalist, was a Hezbollah operation.

Although the maintenance work was fully coordinated with the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, and the fatal shot was fired by the nominally independent Lebanese Armed Forces, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, sent a television crew to film the ambush. He applauded the murder as a ‘heroic confrontation’ and threatened to ‘cut off the arm’ of Lebanon's enemies, ostensibly by firing his Iranian- and Syrian-supplied arsenal of more than 42,000 rockets at Israeli cities and towns.

It is hardly surprising that the ambush turns out to have been another staged performance from the Jihadiwood Production Company, since blogger Emet m’Tsiyon reports that the Lebanese ‘village’ of Adeissa, where the ambush took place, is not a functioning village at all but a Hezbollah military stronghold, consisting merely of

an elaborate system of bunkers and shooting platforms designed to look like houses...

But there is a further surreal twist to the affair. In the Tablet, Yoav Fromer asks whether American arms supplied to the Lebanese army are now being used against Israel. The answer is almost certainly yes.

The pictures speak for themselves: Freshly uniformed Lebanese soldiers, armed with U.S.-made M-16s and backed by U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, can be clearly seen firing at Israeli soldiers who are standing on Israeli territory. Given the generous military aid that Lebanon has been receiving from the United States in recent years—aid that included sophisticated sniper rifles of the kind that may have been used to target and kill the Israeli officer, Lt. Col. Dov Harari—one cannot ignore the possibility that the same U.S. weapons intended to help stabilize Lebanon and secure the northern Israeli border may be having the opposite effect.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Lebanon is now the second-largest recipient of American military aid per capita after Israel. Yet the evidence strongly suggests it has become a Hezbollah fiefdom. Arming the Lebanese forces therefore means arming Hezbollah. Hezbollah, like its sponsor Iran, regards itself as in a holy war against America and the west.

And so what does the Obama administration say about its arms to Lebanon policy? When asked about this after last weekend’s ambush Philip Crowley, Assistant Secretary at the State Department, replied:

This is not the first time we’ve had incidents of this nature. We want to see that they don’t happen again. But we do have interests on both sides of the border. We are committed to Israel’s security, but we’re also committed to Lebanese sovereignty. These interests are not mutual exclusive. They’re not in contradiction.

Let us not forget that a major factor behind the Hezbollah/Iranian takeover of Lebanon is that America so shamefully betrayed its nascent democracy movement, when the US failed to press for the indictment of Syria over the murder of Lebanese President Rafik Hariri. As Lee Smith points out in his fine book The Strong Horse, this stopped dead in its tracks the 'Cedar Revolution' in Lebanon and thus in turn the movement for democracy in the wider Middle East, empowering instead Iran and its terrorist proxies.

America appears to have developed the political equivalent of an auto-immune disease – nourishing those who would kill it, while attacking those who are vital to its health.

7.8.10

A Syrian reformer articulates some truths that urgently need to be heard. "When Islam Acts Like a Conquering Army," by Farid Ghadry of the Reform Party of Syria at AINA, August 7:

what if religion acts like a conquering army? How could we reconcile this fact with our laws? Being an American, laws will always prevail, but being a Muslim also, I have a warning: We will conquer you if you do not change your laws accordingly.

The US better reconcile between Freedom of Religion and Islam as a conquering army soon. The two cannot co-exist for long.

They let one man go because he recited verses from the Qur'an. "Taliban Kill 10 on Medical Aid Mission in Afghanistan," by Rod Nordland and Sharifullah Sahak in the New York Times, August 7 (thanks to Twostellas):

KABUL, Afghanistan -- At least 10 medical personnel, including six Americans, were murdered in northern Afghanistan on Thursday, officials confirmed Saturday. A Taliban spokesman, reached by cellphone, claimed responsibility for the killings. [...]

The victims' bodies were stripped of all belongings, making identification difficult and suggesting robbery as a motive. However, Taliban insurgents are known to be active in the area, and the attackers allowed at least one Afghan to leave the scene unharmed. The survivor, an Afghan driver named Saifullah, told police he was let go because he recited verses from the Koran.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, claimed that the medical team were shot because they ignored an order from the insurgents to stop. Afterwards, he said, they found evidence that the group were American spies and were preaching Christianity. He said they had maps showing their bases, and a Bible in Dari. Although I.A.M. is a Christian-supported group, Mr. Frans said, it does not engage in proselytizing....

Afterwards, Mr. Kentoz said local residents told police, a group of red-bearded gunmen took the group prisoner and marched them on foot to a remote area where they shot them to death. It is common in Afghanistan for older men to dye their beards with henna....

Many apparently mainstream Muslim groups have the same ideology as violent Islamists, according to a secret report from the think tank Quilliam.

The report, sent to the government’s Office for Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT), was not intended for publication but has now been leaked on the internet.

Entitled "Preventing terrorism, where next for Britain?" it says the ideology of non-violent Islamists is “broadly the same as that of violent Islamists” adding “they disagree only on tactics.”

It produces a list of those it believes are “non-violent Islamists” and adds: "These are a selection of the various groups and institutions active in the UK which are broadly sympathetic to Islamism.

“Whilst only a small proportion will agree with al-Qaeda's tactics, many will agree with their overall goal of creating a single 'Islamic state' which would bring together all Muslims around the world under a single government and then impose on them a single interpretation of sharia as state law."